Design Guidelines for Repurposing: A Comprehensive Methodological Literature Review

Abstract Considering that 80% of the environmental impact of a product result from their design, aligning products for circularity is a very promising approach to enable a Circular Economy. Most of the today’s efforts of circular product design are focusing on recycling, which is a low valuable circular strategy as it does not maintain the value added to products and requires a high investment of energy and CO2-emission for the recycling and the production of new products. Recent published works have shown promising results by applying sustainable design aspects into the product engineering process. Repurposing products seems to have a huge potential with closing the gap between reuse and recycling but seems not well researched. As a foundation for further research, we provide an extensive literature review on the design for repurpose. Following the PRISMA guidelines on methodological literature search, we defined search criteria, keywords, and queries to map the scientific landscape of the last decade. The results were filtered and grouped into different design aspects for repurposing. The analysis indicates that there are fundamental design aspects for products with multiple life cycles that can be applied to repurposing. Additionally, various specific design aspects for repurposed products were identified. Furthermore, major research aspects that allow for improvement were identified. Firstly, there is limited data on general design aspects for products with multiple life cycles. Secondly, there are currently no applied design methods for repurposing.